Millennium Bug prophet receives death threats

And the $10 million eBay bid is off as well

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Defrocked prophet of Y2K doom Peter de Jager claims to have received death threats from a number of followers disppointed by the rollover's lack of destructive effects, today's Express reports.

"One death threat in particular began with profanities and the person on the phone made it abundantly clear that my life is now at risk," de Jager reportedly said. De Jager posted on his web site an explanation of why the bug failed to bite as hard as predicted.

The thrust of it is that diligent engineers, responding to warnings like his own, rose to the challenge and defeated the threat. "The additional irony is that our sole goal was to avoid all problems. The greater our success, the more 'evidence' we will provide to the critics to help them 'prove' that Y2K was an illusion," de Jager concludes.

This is the same de Jager who yesterday received an astonishing bid of US $10m for the rights to his domain name, year2000.com, through online auctioneer eBay.

Early suspicions that the bid might be a hoax were confirmed today as eBay failed to reach the bidder for confirmation. The next highest bid appears to have been a hoax as well, and the third highest was withdrawn, eBay said.

The highest legitimate bid appears to be $2.1m, a far cry from the standing record of $7.5m paid by eCompanies for the name business.com. One wonders who in his right mind would pay over $2m for a domain name with a twelve-month life span, and barring any unforseen obstacles, we should all find out who the lucky victim is within a matter of days. ®